(-) :)>@:'
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A girl who wished she could be somewhere, anywhere else stared at her paper, thinking about how she had never had a dentist appointment that she found as unpleasant as third period. She was annoyed at her teacher for ignoring, as usual, the difficulties of having to use a computer for everything. It wasn't like she had many other options. Her handwriting became illegible if she wrote at any speed. She found a way to enter the thoroughly stupid picture on the board into her laptop. She was instructed to turn it into something. As much as she had liked such assignments in the second grade, she could think of a million better uses of two or three minutes of her time as she sat in one of her twelfth grade classes. She added some symbols on her keyboard, thinking to make a monkey wearing a hat. It didn't come out looking much like a monkey, and she found the hat annoying. She decided it would be some sort of ray gun. That better fitted her mood. Then it occurred to her that her school might have a zero-tolerance policy and decide she was a sociopath preparing to kill her classmates if she called it a gun of any kind. She realized she had already mentioned a switchblade in a poem that day and figured she had better not push her luck. She was also worried about ticking off the teacher, or giving the teacher the idea that she was some sort of homicidal sociopath because she was a few hundred miles from anyone else who might write her a college recommendation and felt it behooved her to make a good impression. She added some symbols, hoping it would begin to look like something. Nothing was forthcoming, so she called it a penguin and claimed she had forgotten to add the right wing.